


Hazardous Pursuits

by MrProphet



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-26
Updated: 2014-03-26
Packaged: 2018-01-17 02:57:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1371394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Half-Life and its characters belong to Valve. The Model B became a 90s comic superhero costume in the process of writing.</p></blockquote>





	Hazardous Pursuits

The Mark IV Hazardous Environment suit was a masterpiece, incorporating environmental and trauma protection as well as a sophisticated body-area network linking dozens of biosensors and autonomous medical systems. It was designed to give a single soldier the speed, endurance and firepower to match a full squad of regular troops, and to operate on any battlefield, however appallingly contaminated.

It was a perfect weapon, with only one drawback; the price. Apparently the Government balked at the billion dollar price tag, and thus the suit was relegated to its secondary purpose as a protective outfit for scientific survey. It was not felt that the multitude of scenarios against which the HEV suit was proof were likely to come up in the average special forces tour of duty, which shows how well the Government predicts the future.

Since the Seven Hour War, we’ve been in dire need of a weapon, and money is no longer a factor. Unfortunately, it’s proven rather problematic to recreate the end product of decades of bleeding edge research from the ashes of the civilisation that first created it.

Just for starters, there are virtually no examples of the Mark IV left, as almost all of them were stored and used exclusively at Black Mesa. Kleiner has one, of course, but he insists that it is Gordon Freeman’s suit and will wait for him. He won’t even let anyone else – apart from the Vance girl – help out with his ‘Mark V upgrades’. He’s right of course that no-one else could use it; the suit is fitted and biometrically attuned to Gordon Freeman and would neither fit nor correctly function for anyone else; at worst it might administer unnecessary and life-threatening treatments in an attempt to make the wearer’s vitals match Freeman’s.

We did get hold of one of the old Mark III HEV suits about a year ago, but it’s not the same. It’s bulky, for starters, layers of redundant shielding replacing the electro-hardening polymers and active radiation screening introduced in the Mark IV. When you put it on, you look like that damned dog-bot, and its sensors and medical systems are all macro-mechanical; the nano-scale systems were another Mark IV invention. 

Six months ago we struck paydirt in one of Black Mesa’s field stations in what used to be Kent; not an HEV suit, but a supply of the reactive polymer needed to make one. We can’t replicate it – it took the best part of a month just to reverse engineer the Mark III – but we can use it.

Opinion is divided on whether the new suit should be called the Mark VI or the Model B Mark I, but that’s okay; it keeps people interested in the project in a way that the suit itself doesn’t. It’s bulky compared to the VI, if much less so than the III, and it is – by common accord and partly by design – ugly as sin. The backpack houses the main power supply and is larger than we had hoped, and we still had to use disposable power packs for the auxiliary systems, housing them in receivers on the surface of the armour and holding them in place with leather straps and pouches.

The BAN was based on a late digital wireless system called BlueTooth; slower than an immediately pre-war model, but much easier to set up. Patching it in to the diagnostic and treatment systems of a medkit took longer than breaking down the kit to distribute its parts effectively throughout the suit. The HUD proved impossible without the bespoke visor of the Mk IV; I guess there was something special in the refractive properties of the glass they used. Instead, we adapted an old reflector eyepiece to serve the same function.

It’s no Mk IV, but it’s better than blue overalls and a beanie.

**Author's Note:**

> Half-Life and its characters belong to Valve. The Model B became a 90s comic superhero costume in the process of writing.


End file.
